'Beauty boys' undo makeup gender stereotypes

One of the most compelling people on Instagram these days is a guy who matches his makeup to his snacks.

His name is Tim Owens, but online he goes by Skelotim, and he is a bald, perma-stubbled man who knows his way around a contour kit. Last week, he posted a video of himself applying dark purple eye shadow, sky-blue eyeliner, fluttery fake lashes and a bold grape lipstick. Then, after shooting the camera a succession of saucy glances, he raised a packaged Smucker's Uncrustables peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwich, revealing his culinary inspiration for the day's look.

Watching Skelotim at work is mesmerizing. He slickly sets his makeup routine to pounding pop music, transforming from a regular dude into a sparkling vision of the fabulously strange. It's just like Cinderella twirling around and around until she finds herself wearing a poufy blue ballgown, except Skelotim is changing into a Flamin' Hot Cheeto. In the age of the selfie, what more appropriate canvas is there for an internet artist than his own face?

Skelotim is one of a handful of young men who have primped and preened their way into the female-centric world of Instagram and YouTube makeup artistry. Angel Merino (1.2 million Instagram followers), a celebrity makeup artist, rocks glam, high-gloss looks and possesses an almost supernatural grasp of flattering camera angles. Jake-Jamie Ward, YouTube's 24-year-old Beauty Boy, favors a more naturalistic approach; his popular video primer “Makeup for Men” includes tips on blemish concealing and beard navigation. And Patrick Starrr films elaborate makeup tutorials for YouTube (where he has 1.7 million subscribers), then heads over to Instagram to post pictures of himself frolicking in Las Vegas and Bora Bora.

No matter what these guys are doing, it feels a little bit electric. A man celebrating himself in makeup is a subversive act.

And all of a sudden, the cosmetics industry wants in. Last week, CoverGirl named its first cover boy, James Charles, a 17-year-old from New York state who has amassed an audience of 724,000 Instagram followers for selfies of his face painted with Lisa Frank colors, Roy Lichtenstein-inspired looks and trippy landscapes. Not to be outdone, Maybelline has found its own It boy in Manny Gutierrez, a YouTube and Instagram beauty star known as Manny Mua, who posts exhilarating makeup hauls, snappy tutorials and dishy monologues about his journey from Mormon boy to man in makeup. Last week he was named to People magazine's Ones to Watch annual shortlist of rising stars.

These “beauty boys,” as they're sometimes called, are not just being accepted into the mainstream beauty world. They are helping to give the cosmetics industry a much-needed modern makeover. Maybelline's mantra - “Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline.” - called on women to fix their flaws with makeup tricks and to present as natural beauties. Male beauty gurus deconstruct that illusion. They recast makeup not as a supplement for natural deficiencies, but as a form of joyful creation.

Much of the appeal of the beauty boy lies in his embrace of makeup's playful artifice. Ben Pierce, who calls himself a “passionate eyebrow activist,” has filmed YouTube videos made up as a pumpkin and a sexy egg. Half the fun of watching Gutierrez's videos is catching the self-consciously silly “Zoolander” looks he shoots the camera between makeup tricks. Recently he brought his own ring light to his senior photo shoot to make sure, as he put it, that “my highlight would be poppin.” As these men cake on the makeup, they're unpacking gender norms, too. The male beauty experts of YouTube and Instagram are not drag queens, performers who use makeup to transform themselves into a heady mirage of feminine excess. Many of them embrace their traditionally masculine features - stubble, beards, bald heads. As Patrick Starrr says in one of his videos: “I am a man. I am a man in makeup. And I love makeup so much.”

In the comments that unspool under their videos, men gather to trade recommendations for matte bronzers, yes, but also to work through anxieties about their gender and sexual identities. (As one curious lurker asked, “If I do this is it gay?” Nope, the crowd replied.)

Male beauty experts endure online harassment - trolls routinely flag Skelotim's Instagram videos as inappropriate, simply because they show a man in makeup - and they create new videos to counter the haters.

After Pierce ran into an acquaintance who told him that men aren't supposed to wear makeup, he filmed a satirical monologue, “Why Boys Can't Wear Makeup,” in which he adopted the persona of a male makeup skeptic - “I mean, makeup is not going to help me win ‘Call of Duty' - all while effortlessly highlighting, contouring and blending his face to perfection.

As Starrr said in a video last month, “We are bringing awareness to equality one lash at a time.”

The female makeup experts who have built an online community around beauty, like Michelle Phan and Zoe Sugg, have done much to elevate makeup application into a transgressive act. Unlike your typical CoverGirl model, they routinely appear makeup-free, then reveal what makeup can do (and what it can't). Their videos frame makeup application as its own reward, an individualistic exercise as opposed to a fulfillment of cultural expectations. Once the makeup is applied, the video ends.

Still, a woman's relationship to makeup can be weighted with cultural baggage. While watching female beauty gurus do their thing, it can be hard for me to turn off that destructive part of my brain that is always poking at me to compare myself physically with other women. And it's tricky to untangle genuine enthusiasm for the art of makeup from the toxic beauty standards that encourage women to spend tons of money on their looks.

But as a woman, watching men transform themselves through makeup has felt transformative for me, too. These men and boys make the subversive power of makeup crystal clear. When they slick on lipstick, the image is the opposite of conforming.

Their example is one that I'll carry back to my own makeup mirror, where I can use cosmetics to look amazingly weird Both women and men can rejoice: Makeup is no longer just a girl thing.